I’m a sucker for movie popcorn. You can tell me how awful it is and how it isn’t fresh or that it’s terribly fattening or full of fat or salt or hidden ingredients that will make me confess to giving top secret documents to the Soviets (Remember them? I just saw the movie Breach and it reminded me of the olden days when the bad guys in all the movies were the Soviets.)

You can tell me how much more delicious homemade popcorn is and how much better it is for you especially if you use an air popper and no butter.

But I don’t care. I love movie popcorn. And I am a sucker because even though it is way way more than I should eat, I always buy the big tub because it is such a bargain compared with the small bag. If you can call paying over $6 for popcorn a bargain. Also, if I buy the tub at my local theater I can get a free refill, so that I can have stale movie popcorn in my house to nibble on for a few days.

When I was a girl my brother and I went to the movies by ourselves over the weekend. My mother gave us each 10 cents for a treat. That dime got us a box worth of popcorn, though my brother sometimes bought Jujubes or Dots.

We never thought about whether the box of popcorn was large or small. That’s the only size there was. (Today if you have a store like Party City in your neighborhood you can buy those boxes to use for party favors.)

One of the problems I wrestle with these days is that we have Netflix and PPV and DVDs and so on and they come so quickly after a movie is out that we don’t get to the theater as often as we used to. So I’ve been really missing my popcorn recently.

Home cooked popcorn may not be as wonderful as movie popcorn, however, if you do something else with it, like make it into caramel corn or some other sweet-and-salty goodie, it might make up for the lack. It’s also a good treat for watching the Academy Awards ceremony.

For all you committed movie popcorn lovers, try this:

Heavenly Hash Popcorn

2 quarts plain, popped corn

1 cup packed mini-marshmallows

1/2 cup salted peanuts

7 ounces chocolate (milk or semisweet)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Spread the popcorn out on a large jelly roll pan. Sprinkle the marshmallows and nuts on top. Break up the chocolate into small pieces and scatter the pieces on top. Bake for 5 minutes. Let cool and toss slightly. Makes about 2 quarts